Mini-Tidbits: Viacom Walkout, Twitter for News, More…

LIVE From Times Square: Viacom Walkout! (Silicon Alley Insider): “SAI correspondent Davide Berretta is live in Times Square, on the scene of the Viacom walkout to protest shoddy treatment of freelancers. We’ll update reports as we get them…”

How about a Twitter city desk? (Steve Outing): “How about asking city editors (or whatever you call your front-line editors) to feed a breaking-news Twitter flow throughout the day? This could be a valuable service (and, I bet, popular among news junkies).”

Oprah endorses Obama, my vote’s for Twitter (editor on the verge): “If the fact that Twitter is a free site doesn’t entice you [to put it to work in your news org], how about the fact that Twitter is crawled by search engines thus providing your site additional exposure or how about the fact that Twitter can even help with your page rank?”

NYTimes Surges, Cnet Slumps (TechCrunch): At NYTimes.com, traffic has been going through the roof [since scrapping Times Select]. ComScore says it gained 7.5 million readers worldwide from the end of August through the end of October. That is a 64 percent jump (to a total of 19.4 million).

Gathering news not only for the next day but for now (Carol Goodhue, SignOn San Diego): “SignOn San Diego’s Breaking News Team: “Works daily with beat reporters — enhances stories on complicated topics. In return, the team helps reporters post to blogs and file stories as it chips away at changing the next-day (not next-minute) mindset.”

Portals, Local Content: The Mother of all Battles (paidContent): AP CEO Tom Curley: “We must go forward with all aspects of Web 2.0. Our content should float. It should go where people want it, and we should get compensated for it and the way to [get] compensation is different than the way it’s been for 162 years.”

Clearspring Launches Widget Ad Network With Major Partners (Digital Media Wire): “Clearspring said the tool will allow publishers to monetize their digital content across social networking sites, start pages and blogs by creating ad networks to serve ads within widgets. 12 advertising and publishing firms will use the network.”